Are "Hard" and "Challenging" the Same Thing?
Grapple With Something
As I move through the days, the things I am prone to write about tend to find me. You read things, you hear things on podcasts, and you have conversations with people where recurring prompts or topics seem to appear. Perhaps my wiring is off, or this is how all of humanity works, or maybe the brain works that way, something hits you and you must chew on it till you are done with it.
For me the writing process is a way to release the result of chewing on something. For weeks now the word "hard" as in "I do hard" things keeps coming up. Now I have heard this for years, in some ways I think Dave Goggins might have started this arms race if you will, where I can out hard you, it became a badge of honor, something to tell people about. I certainly participated in this, thinking oh hell yah I do hard stuff.
I was catching up with a friend a few weeks ago, a man I have known my entire career, he had recently retired. We were catching up on life since the last time we talked. He had found out he has cancer, he noted right away that it was very treatable. Without missing a beat, he said dont let anyone mislead you, chemotherapy is no joke. As he recounted this to me, my mind went a variety of places, but I remembered reading or hearing something just prior to that recounting doing a very physical hike or climb as doing a hard thing.
I started questioning my own use of the word "hard", does this word come out because it is a single syllable word, and it just rolls off the tongue easier than "challenge". Are "hard" and "challenge" the same thing? Why am I so sensitive to this word all the sudden? The answer to those questions is that I am mad at myself for being so willing to just adopt something that is appealing before I have thought about it critically. I think of myself as a critical thinker, but I sure dont practice that enough.
I also know that I used this as a way to elevate myself, I do hard things, you dont. Right? That is the pecking order. Would you say that in conversation with a cancer patient going through chemo? Would a cancer patient use "hard" as frivolously as we seem to now?
You can Google the definition of "hard", there is a myriad of permutations for this word, the ones that I most readily identify with are:
Done with a great deal of force or strength
Requiring a great deal of endurance or effort
Difficult to bear, causing suffering
I then looked up the word "challenge", there are a few permutations for this, but as a noun you can say it is "a task or situation that tests someone's abilities". The present participle is the verb "challenging" which is to DO difficult or impossible things.
Hard in the sense we are using it here would be considered an adverb, whereas the word challenge would be either a noun or a verb depending on the use. An adverb modifies a verb, such as "hard work". Why does that matter? Maybe it doesn't. I see it as a label for the action, telling the world you are doing the difficult things and incurring the suffering, rather than the action. To do challenging things is the act, it requires no further modification. You did the thing, it was challenging, you are in the business of bettering or challenging yourself, not to create a hierarchy with others.
As I grapple with this mentally and in writing, it comes down to the ease with which "hard" rolls off the tongue, it cheapens the meaning of this word because if everything is hard for performative reasons then nothing is hard. I think in reality in our world today, we are all in such a place where we dont know that much about really hard things, so we substitute challenges or challenging activities to find the fulfillment of saying we do hard things.
When you have seen people who have done really truly hard things, survive cancer and the treatments that entails, to watch two young women choose not to abort their unborn children so that I may have a family, or to come in contact with those who have fought and served our country, it gives me pause, it causes me to think before I utter the word hard.
I think we are blessed, for the most part enjoying first world comfort, so to call various activities that we choose to do hard, might be a little gratuitous. I think we need to challenge ourselves, we should engage in challenging activities. Again, I am guilty of this, but I am talking here about how I am trying to reframe my thinking and the thought process that went into it. I am in effect challenging you, my readers, to think about how you use words, and to think and grapple with the impact those words have.